O'Connor's situated her conceptions of Catholic beliefs and practices into her fictional renderings of a Southern religious landscape. O'Connor wanted to reveal the reality of evil to an audience lost in a secular age. O'Connor was like [[John Henry Newman]] in her dialectic understanding of an interaction of presences in the world, one "diabolical" and the other "sacred." In her short story "Parker's Back," O'Connor was interested in the union of body and soul as elaborated by [[Thomas Aquinas]]. In "The Violent Bear It Away," O'Connor uses "displaced sacraments" to reveal the Incarnation of Christ in seemingly perverse characters and contexts. She also used Protestant fundamentalist theology, as in the "The River" where Harry Ashfield is baptized by drowning. <ref> See McMullen and Peede, eds. ''Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor'' (2007)</ref> | O'Connor's situated her conceptions of Catholic beliefs and practices into her fictional renderings of a Southern religious landscape. O'Connor wanted to reveal the reality of evil to an audience lost in a secular age. O'Connor was like [[John Henry Newman]] in her dialectic understanding of an interaction of presences in the world, one "diabolical" and the other "sacred." In her short story "Parker's Back," O'Connor was interested in the union of body and soul as elaborated by [[Thomas Aquinas]]. In "The Violent Bear It Away," O'Connor uses "displaced sacraments" to reveal the Incarnation of Christ in seemingly perverse characters and contexts. She also used Protestant fundamentalist theology, as in the "The River" where Harry Ashfield is baptized by drowning. <ref> See McMullen and Peede, eds. ''Inside the Church of Flannery O'Connor'' (2007)</ref> |